Elon Musk Says Bitcoin Brilliant, Better Than Paper Money

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, commented that Bitcoin's structure is quite brilliant. During an interview on advisory services firm ARK Invest's podcast, Musk also said paper money is going away, and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper.

The remarks were made while he was talking with Tasha Keeney, Analyst at ARK Invest and Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO, and CIO at ARK Invest chat about the future of Tesla and autonomous driving.

According to him, one of the downsides of crypto, however, is that computationally it is quite energy intensive, and there needs to be some kind of constraints on the creation of crypto. But it's very energy intensive to create the incremental Bitcoin at this point, he said.

Last year, Musk had tweeted that he literally owns zero cryptocurrency apart from the 0.25 BTC a friend had given to him many years ago.

Bitcoin, the first and largest cryprocurrency, has high profile supporters, including Twitter Inc.'s co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, who said recently that he is holding only and enough bitcoins. He also said that Bitcoin will become the "native currency of the Internet."

Earlier, Mike Novogratz, a former Goldman Sachs partner and founder of crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital, had said Bitcoin is going to be digital gold, a place where you have sovereign money.

Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, also was eager to see Bitcoin as the single global currency.

Bitcoin is currently trading at $3,983.87, up 1.01 percent over a 24-hour period, according to coinmarketcap.com.